How to Build Your Microgrid

The U.S. electricity grid is starting to feel the strain of increased demand. 

“One of the latest forecasts I have seen is that nationwide up to a 5% increase in demand over the next five years could be expected,” said Jeff Donaldson, CDM Smith

Elec­tri­fi­ca­tion lead, at a recent webinar called Unleashing the Power of Microgrids.

“This is significant and could lead to more frequent grid instability.”

In the face of these insta­bil­i­ties and potential inter­rup­tions to facility operations, microgrids are an effective way to help increase reliability. 

So, what are microgrids exactly? 

A microgrid is a grouping of local, distributed energy resources that can be operated either connected to the utility in parallel or discon­nected from the utility in island mode.

Microgrids provide more than power. Benefits range from enhanced resilience in the face of natural disasters and grid failures to the unpar­al­leled levels of energy efficiency and intelligent operational capa­bil­i­ties. In the simplest terms, they allow you to control your energy supply with greater confidence. 

Step 1: Identify Critical Success Factors

Building a microgrid starts with critical success factors. In other words, what benefits do you want to gain from a microgrid?

Some common critical success factors include: improving resiliency and reliability; meeting carbon emissions goals; reducing utility bills; or just providing better control of your costs by under­stand­ing what the yearly operating expen­di­tures might be for your facility.

By identifying what's important to you, it helps you hit the ground running. It also helps align your goals with the rest of your team, minimizing wasted efforts and internal roadblocks. 

Step 2: Start Planning

The planning process starts with evaluating your load require­ments and asking, what do you need? 

The planning stage typically includes: 

• Gathering and organizing the data and identifying any gaps. This may involve field assessments, metering, or other methods. 
• Creating a timeline with milestones. 
• Engaging with the stake­hold­ers and identifying any external experts.
• Deciding what types of distributed energy resources we want to include in our microgrid. 
• Examining our reliability and resiliency needs and expec­ta­tions. What level of uptime do we need to maintain? What are our most essential operations that need to stay online? What operations can tolerate some instability? 
• Analyzing our historical weather data and security risks. What are the most likely events that could disrupt our operations? 

Step 3: Conduct Detailed Analysis

In-depth analysis can simulate how different kinds of distributed energy resources would work across your microgrid. To do that, it’s important to have the right tools.  One such tool is the ETAP microgrid module. With this, you can build the whole power system in the ETAP program and simulate real-time energy flow and usage when you activate different distributed energy resources that might be part of the system. 

Another advanced planning tool is called the Hybrid Opti­miza­tion Model for Multiple Energy Resources (HOMER). HOMER is also useful in showing how the distributed energy resources can work, and addi­tion­ally gives some financial performance data and modeling. 

Steps 4 - 6: Design, Build, Monitor

While the three previous steps may take consid­er­able time and effort, they make the final road to imple­men­ta­tion and commis­sion­ing far more efficient. Once we have these three building blocks, the design process should be straight­for­ward.

Your microgrid is an ever-evolving asset. It's something that you own, operate, and it changes with your needs as they grow or downsize. Fortunately, it’s also something you can control. 

The great part of the microgrid controller is that it stores and records large amounts of data, data from the demand and consumption and production of your distributed energy resources. It can also pull in data from your overall electrical distri­b­u­tion system. Having this breadth of data helps you make better decisions for your operators.